policegirljosh

Passed Cartoon Heroes. Passed Rhythm and Police. Cs on both. 554 combo on Hot Limit.

Majorly sweaty.

I think I like Low best at their most banal. Lyrically speaking. Not speaking lyrically, ha ha. See Sunflower; see California.

Unwarranted effusiveness:

It turns out Acrobat has OCR built in. I may or may not have OCR'd all my old fuzzy inter-library loan PDFs when I found out. Searchable!

The third novella in this collection (We don't live here anymore) has some of the same characters as the second. Am I allowed to regard this as a dispensation made specially for me? Either way. Dubus writes about pain and not much else. The happy bits make the rest grimmer yet. I wonder if I should read something else.

...I saw myself in the book, a single man drinking gin and loving a married woman. I thought of the sleeping children above me and was ashamed; but I also felt the slow and persuasive undertow of delight.

***

I do feel guilty about reading fiction when there's work to be done. But only a little.

Taking the hands

Taking the hands of someone you love,
You see they are delicate cages...
Tiny birds are singing
In the secluded prairies
And in the deep valleys of the hand.

***

I keep reading poems the way I'm accustomed to reading the Times. It's easier to see each word in the shorter ones. I want to memorize poems I don't understand so that, one day, they can reveal themselves to me at some pivotal moment. Like unexpected compassion. I want, one day, my hidden strength of character to reveal itself. If this happens in the form of a half-forgotten poem, I'll have no cause to complain.

Now, this is odd.

A few weeks ago I read A Prayer for Owen Meany and was put off by the story's hints, and the narrator's explicit conviction, that a god exists. And that he busies himself with making miracles, sometimes. I've always liked John Irving, but this book--well, the narrator's not at all sympathetic, and I think there's more to that than his faith.

The odd thing is this: I really liked intimations of divinity in two movies, Frailty and Signs. Both of these are, maybe obliquely, about faith, too. I'm not sure why I like the movies and not the book.

This is the epigraph:

"Not the least of my problems is that I can hardly even imagine what kind of an experience a genuine, self-authenticating religious experience would be. Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me."

The suggestion of a modern-day virgin birth in Owen Meany was interesting, anyway, because of the outrage it spurred among the Catholic cast. The peculiarities of religious credulity are beyond me, I think. Why accept one virgin birth but no others? Why believe that Christ or Hosea or Amos or anyone heard the voice of god but label putative present-day prophets schizophrenics? Is faith only comfortable at a great remove of time?

Well. Now I'm going to find a copy of Intimations of Immortality, if I can, and read it. And I'd really like to see Frailty again sometime. And I'm not exactly hostile toward religion, or angry about it--genuinely confused, really.

"Hello, Jesus. We're the atheists. We're taking your Second Coming ass down."

Wordism of the day: gaminish. 'Snot in the dictionary, so I figured it for a halfhearted adjective form of gamine. Thanks, Philip Roth! It's a shame I don't enjoy your writing, otherwise.

Meanwhile, I've got a meeting with a potential grad school supervisor this Thursday at NYU. I'm budgeting enough time so that I can tolerate missing either my bus or my subway--not both. I'd better start cultivating a handshake. That and some kind of charm. I may pick my fingernails with a switchblade if I'm feeling gutsy.

Everything's cauterized, more or less, but I got honest-to-God misty reading a piece in last weekend's Times Magazine. An article on Bumfights. I'd known about the videos for some time, in an abstract way--they'd elicited a witless "how awful!" and nothing more. But.

"The homeless coalition says it fears that the films have contributed to teenage violence against the homeless, especially because viewers are encouraged to submit 'ruckus' footage of their own. According to law-enforcement officials, a number of young people have videotaped themselves attacking homeless people, including four teenagers in Melbourne, Australia, who killed a man by setting fire to his tent; five in Alberta, Canada, who assaulted a homeless man with bottles and a club, then urinated on his face; and four young men near Cleveland, who crept up on homeless people and shocked them with a stun gun."

It's been a firm policy of mine to regard everything as at least potentially funny. Usually it's poor execution or slack wit that disqualifies a would-be gutbuster (where's my freaking thesaurus?). But but but. Some cows may yet be sacred. Stinkwavy, homeless cows. See? Levity's earthbound. I don't think I feel well.

(An attack of empathy? Unaccountable. I still feel mean and ugly and horrible. Grinch-hearted. Today I had my first-ever fond recollection of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which I never finished in high school. Well, nothing but time now.)

Bare walls and gap-toothed bookshelves remind me that my surroundings, media-wise, aren't properly reflective of my (great and terrible) inner beauty. There's not enough that's pretty around here--the apartment's sort of drab, and it's getting me down. So I'm formally soliciting internet-communicable pretties--photos or text or musics or whatever. Or books I should've read but haven't.

Send me thingses.

Stuck again--one of those ruts where conversations turn grave without cause. Everything's longfaced and morose, and I'm sick of it. Today I felt determined to be happy about things--chin up, and all. This meant playing the Pillows a little too loud and buying video games and making up a grimly cheerful list of lovely stuffs to do. Several of which I did. Michael Jackson and Flash Gordon t-shirts should be forthcoming.

Well! I can't say whether the music was happy or stifling. It felt a little cramped in the car. I opened the windows, and the pressure seemed to dissipate.

I can't figure this, honestly. Things are probably as good as they've ever been. Indignities aside (Computer Science 361), school's fulfilling. The horizon's bright etc., and I'm keeping good company. Any day now I'll plant my plants at home--a flowering almond and a pink weigela and a hydrangea. C.'s sewing morning glories out front.

Nonetheless. I get the feeling something's not quite right. Certainly not a major concern--I'll persevere. The whole thing's pretty unremarkable, I think.

Put differently, I've been singing Poisoning Pigeons in the Park along the walk from the parking lot to morning class.

Spring is here; spring is here. Life is Skittles, and life is beer. I think the loveliest time of the year is the spring, I do. Don't you? 'Course you do!

Movies for the weekend: Twelfth Night (multicultural version); Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter
Music for the moment: Kim Deal (the Pillows, Happy Bivouac)
Current amusements: Soul Blade; Final Fantasy IX
Current tea: Chai
Current kebab: Lamb
Current trend in t-shirt adornment: Christian's gruesome visage

All:

You'll want to give me wide berth for a while. Understand that I'm willing and (I think) able to cause pain to a lot of people. This is not dick-swinging bravado. This is a backhand effort to preserve relations that I recognize I might miss in moments of weakness.

N.B.: I am not sad or snively or in need of hugs. Please refrain. Soft knocks and cautiously pitched overtures of concern will be met with prejudice.

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Fond old fool.

Alternatively:

Silly old bear.

Bemoaning my diction, my manners, and my general conduct of late. I'm superlatively happy with friends, here and elsewhere, despite occasional standoffishness or unavailability. Inasmuch as I'm capable of it*, I do love you all.

Be assured: I'm turning over improbable and woefully misguided schemes in my head, all of them motivated by the best intentions.

*A dusty topic all suffused with gloom 'nstuff. For more thorough discussion, cf. My Personal History, My Habitual Pessimism on the Matter of Love, etc. (And then I realized I should've just said "Never mind.")

I left the light on when I left and felt warm, coming back to lit room. It's not chrismas lights and hot cider, but it's a start. Awaiting winter, when cider and friends are most appreciated.

Take this as shorthand for my state of mind.

Aviso. H.'s absence has left me largely without hugs. I shall take corrective action.

Sin City shots at my better half: http://humanoid-josh.blogspot.com

Also, my darling sister brought me cookies today. Mom tagged along. Elllllipsis.

Coin operated boy--
Sitting on the shelf, he is just a toy.
But I turn him on, and he comes to life:
Automatic joy.
That is why I want--a coin operated boy.

Who could ever ever ask for more?
Love without complications galore...


Squee.

Also picked up Lost in the Funhouse at the bookstore this afternoon. This has happened before: last year I sat there among books & shoppers & Codi and read the eponymous story. Re-read, 'cause my eleventh grade English teacher had said it to us aloud one slow day. Mostly I remembered the phrase "scrotum-tightening" and the titters that had ensued. Anyway, I just read "Title"--funny, since I'd just heard "Title of the Song" for the first time yesterday. So. Now I count Barth among the timesinks and sinkholes and wholesale timewasting that hem around the path of collegiate righteousness.

Eagerly awaiting a weekend full of promise & pies of all sizes.

policegirljosh: can a horse make love to a woman in this boat?
keithweissglass: Um, no.
policegirljosh: tell me more about this boat.

Alternate title: Self-slaughter. And yes, the first title is a dumbass reference to My So-Called Life. So sue me.

Today I cut myself shaving. Yesterday I fell off a swing set. The sight of a nineteen-year-old kid splatting face-down onto an unwelcoming carpet of wood chips (pointy) has interesting effects on (normally, I'm sure, very nice & nurturant) moms (frozen horror) and their playground-aged kids (poke with sticks; "Mom, why isn't he moving?"). Back amid the hustle and flow of juvenile delinquency and the emotional instability presumed to underlie it, I was often told I was a danger to myself and to others (I always thought it was nice of the teachers/therapists/police saying it that they spoke of my safety first). It turns out that old refrain was right--in unexpected ways. I might really be better off in a padded chamber. Wink.

For real: all's well. I remembered, about a week late, a line from a Mountain Goats song:
Hands in your pockets and sun on your face, the warm love of God coursing through you: home again!

Current amusement: A Scanner Darkly

Navy is officially lost. The family's stuck somewhere between (premature) bereavement and apathy. Mom's more annoyed at Dad for not noticing Navy's absence than anything else. I asked her to call the police about it, and she muttered something sullenly about Lizzie, my thirteen-year-old sister who's attached to the cats at least as closely as I am, being perfectly capable of calling gruff, unfriendly bluesuits to report her missing kitty. Probably the Leonia police will get a call from Haverford, PA tomorrow--possibly a first.

So the parents continue their longtime slouch toward infancy. Lizzie reports being driven outside to sit (disconsolate, waifish, I imagine her) on the curb outside until they'd spent themselves bitching. I can't even remember when I stopped caring about their nasty little squabbles, but a minor event sticks out: me, in my smallclothes, probably somewhere in the thick of middle school, asking them to please keep it down so's I could sleep. I'll say I was born with a broomstick in my hand and jerkheads playing DDR upstairs.

So I'd like to be a few years older, with a job etc., and have the sister live with me. I at least have the sense to keep my fights under wraps. Anyway, they dried up a while ago.

But I've been out to sea for a long time.

I'll award a superfluity of points or some embarrassing gesture of appreciation to anyone who identifies the quote and its particular significance to me, in my particular situation. Scratch that--just name the source. Context would be gravy, or icing, or something.